Technically Speaking: California CIO Talks Near-Term Priorities, Challenges

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Department of Technology (CDT) Director and state CIO Liana Bailey-Crimmins offered a high-level glimpse at near-term IT priorities during the State of Technology* event Thursday.

Chief among the many priorities is getting generative AI tools into the hands of the state’s workforce and expanding on proof of concept projects that began in 2024.

The CIO noted that departments continuing their work with generative AI proofs of concept are in the implementation phase, with the Department of Finance (DOF) and Employment Development Department (EDD) leading this work. The DOF project focuses on digesting legislation and its impacts, while EDD is focusing on employment prediction and recession forecasting.

Earlier iterations of this work manifested in several projects led by the departments of Transportation, Tax and Fee Administration and Public Health.

Bailey-Crimmins urged vendors with these sorts of tools to sign the state’s terms and conditions so that they can be adopted by departments through marketplaces hosted through state partners such as Google, Oracle, AWS and others.

CDT and its partners are also working on an in-house, purpose-built state digital assistant using seven large language models trained on the state's data. Bailey-Crimmins noted that the state is doing this work not to compete with the market, but rather to embrace the market and its advancements.

Currently, 20 departments are developing use cases for these assistants and are “not waiting for perfection,” Bailey-Crimmins said, adding that iteration and improvement will be a part of this work.

The CIO also highlighted the work done by the state’s technology community in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires. The department and its partners quickly built out a platform that offered affected residents access to critical services.

“People needed us and we needed to show up,” she said, adding, “We couldn’t wait for the perfect product.”

The next iteration of that work will include a statewide recovery site that can scale to meet the myriad disasters that residents must face. That portal will be centralized, multilingual and scalable, and streamline multiple agency processes, the CIO said.

*The State of Technology – California Industry Forum was hosted by Government Technology, Industry Insider — California's sister publication.